A chapter from Steve Baer's serialized solar energy book in the Tribal Messenger (April 1973, page 13), with drawings by Ellie McGilly. Part technical primer on collector orientation, part speculative fiction about solar energy politics. It is the archive's earliest statement that collector geometry is climate geometry.
Baer's opening insight: "Surfaces with different orientations have different climates. Heat collectors copy their orientations from warm parts of the planet." A south-wall collector in Albuquerque is parallel to the earth's horizon about 700 miles north of the Antarctic — Dougherty Island — so it receives plenty of winter sun but little summer sun. A collector tilted 45° is parallel to a point 1,200 miles north of Easter Island.
The key practical finding: misalignment is forgiving. At 25° off perpendicular you still intercept over 90% of possible sunshine. "Pretty close is close enough."
| Degrees off | % intercepted |
|---|---|
| 0° | 100% |
| 10° | 98.5% |
| 25° | 90.6% |
| 45° | 70.7% |
| 60° | 50% |
| 90° | 0% |
Baer suggests a gnomon tool — a bull's-eye with a rod casting a shadow — to reveal orientation efficiency in the field.
The middle section is fiction, not engineering. Baer imagines two scenarios where solar energy becomes a weapon:
Helicopter shrouds: The government flies giant shade-cloths over solar-powered communities, plunging them into artificial winter until dissidents reconnect to the grid. "A few weeks in the shade and the solar houses were out of commission."
Mirror riots: Protesters armed with foot-square mirrors focus sunlight on police cars and office buildings, starting fires. "800 mirrors out in the street… by dark there have been 100 fires." The police try to confiscate mirrors but "the matter is in the courts." Children on the street: "I'm just usin' this mirror 'cause I'm combin' my hair, no law against combin' your hair is there?"
These vignettes explore what happens when energy is decentralized: the state can suppress it (shade), but citizens can also weaponize it (mirrors). Neither scenario is comfortable. The fiction is a warning about what solar independence actually means politically.
Baer critiques Peter Glaser's proposal (funded with a $200,000 AD Little grant) to orbit a satellite that collects solar energy and beams it to Earth as microwaves. His objection is cultural, not technical: "Are we that short of energy? Why not burn wood? Wouldn't it be cheaper to build collectors on the ground and accept a little cloudiness and the occurrence of nighttime?"
He sees the satellite as a dream of ownership and control — "Why settle for a sun that goes out at night and is interrupted by clouds? Why not build one yourself?" — and warns that the desire to turn the sun into a commodity ("like a big tank of propane") misses the point of solar energy entirely. This critique prefigures the Tax, shine, and sunshine essay thirty years later.
The chapter ends with three references: